with alcohol, such as business worries or disappointment in love. Drugs are a substitute for the thing instinctively needed, but an unsatisfactory substitute, because they never bring full instinctive satisfaction.[1]
With the advance of what is called civilization, our social and material environment has changed faster than our instincts, so that there has been an increasing discrepancy between the acts to which we are impelled by instinct and those to which we are constrained by prudence. Up to a point, this is quite unavoidable. Murder, robbery, and rape are actions which may be prompted by instinct, but an orderly society must repress them. Work, especially when many are employed in one undertaking, requires regularity, which is utterly contrary to our untrained nature. And although a man who followed his impulses in a state of nature would (at least in a cold climate) do a good deal of work in the course of an average day, yet it is very rare indeed that a man has any spontaneous impulse to the work which he has to do in a modern industrial community. He works for the sake of the pay, not because he likes the work. There are of course exceptions: artists, inventors, men of learning, healthy mothers who have few children and strong maternal instincts, people in positions of authority, a small percentage of sailors and peasants. But the exceptions are not sufficiently numerous to be an important section of the whole. The irksomeness of work has no doubt always existed since men took to agriculture; it is mentioned in Genesis as a curse, and heaven has always been imagined as a place where no one does any work. But industrial methods have certainly made work more remote from instinct, and have destroyed the joy in craftsmanship which gave handicraftsmen something of the satisfaction of the artist. I do not think that, if industrial methods survive, we can hope to make the bulk of necessary work pleasant. The best we can hope is to diminish its amount, but there is no doubt that its amount could be diminished very greatly. It is chiefly in this direction that we must look for a lessening of the instinctive dissatisfaction involved in work.
A "return to nature," such as Rousseau's disciples dreamt of, is not possible without a complete break-up of our civilization. Regimentation, especially, is of the very essence of industrialism, which
- ↑ I do not wish this to be regarded as an argument for prohibition, to which on the whole I am opposed.
